1 month ago

This looks life a lot of fun do play. I had a Sydri, Galvanic Genius deck in the past that was similar. I find that these decks that pack in all the artifact combos that they can are a bit inconsistent, but it's partially offset by the fact that so many of the combo pieces have synergy with cards outside of their combos. For instance, Mycosynth Lattice and Darksteel Forge are useful and can usually be powered out at a decent speed in these decks, but they you typically want to pair them with cards like Vandalblast, Nevinyrral's Disk, Karn, Silver Golem, and Sydri to get the most value out of them. Without those support cards, they might be better off being removed for either more card draw spells or cards to protect your other combo pieces.

The Sharuum combo is another one of those consistency decisions. The combo cards take up 4 slots, and are all useful individually, but it is a 3 card combo and those could be 4 slots given to card draw spells to help dig you into your other combos more consistently.

If you are going to use 3 card combos, you may as well focus on the combos that use Breya, since you know that you will always have access to her. Nim Deathmantle could be included to give your combos more redundancy, since it can play the same roll as Eldrazi Displacer while also giving you the options of getting infinite tokens/colorless mana off Wurmcoil Engine.

Felidar Guardian is another possible inclusion that can let you get infinite hasty tokens with Saheeli Rai, reset a planeswalker that you've ticked down, blink Breya for more tokens, or just give you a blocker that can also untap one of the mana artifacts like Grim Monolith you used to cast it.

You should also try and stay away from creature based strategies because they are fairly slow and because infinite combos are just so much better in EDH. You already have a couple combo pieces in your deck such as Thopter Foundry which combos with Sword of the Meek and Krark-Clan Ironworks. You also have Scrap Trawler which combos with Krark-Clan Ironworks if you have "eggs" or artifacts that draw you cards when it etbs or dies.

I don't think some of the planeswalkers or creatures really have a place in an artifact deck. While they may be good individually, these cards have little to no synergy to the rest of the artifact theme of your deck.

1 month ago

This deck is extremely slow, from the looks of it. 4.10 average mana cost with only 4 pieces of acceleration means you're going to spend a lot of turns playing lands, passing, and doing nothing.

If you're wanting to mess with opponent's strategies, then I recommend these cards:

Aven Mindcensor. He's absurdly good vs combo and he's really cheap to buy right now- before his reprint he was a $10+ card, and now he's less than a dollar. Pick some up, he's good in this format vs Demonic Tutor and fetch lands.

Linvala, Keeper of Silence. Shuts off mana dorks and powerful activated abilities alike. Slows opponents down and will force many decks to scramble to come up with a way to get rid of her in order to play out their strategy.

Thalia, Heretic Cathar. Slows opponents down a little bit if they run as many nonbasics as you, but also shuts off haste effectively by bringing their hasted creatures in tapped.

Hushwing Gryff. Effective second copy of that 2 mana Ixalan guy with the same ability. If you don't like opponents abusing ETBs, may as well go all the way with it.

Aura of Silence is one of the best pieces of artifact/echantment hate. Opponents get taxed like crazy and they have to play around it- it's a strong card.

Rhystic Study- either you draw a boat load of cards or everyone else gets slowed down to one turn behind curve. Either way, you win.

So, I'm just going to list off some cards I don't like or view as suboptimal. Problem is, I don't know what cards are your placeholders and which are not (I'm assuming Sensei Golden Tail is a placeholder):

Bright Reprisal is terrible. Swords to Plowshares exiles the creature at any time for only 1 mana. Sure, it doesn't draw a card, but paying 4 more mana just to draw a card isn't a good exchange anyway.

Sphere of Safety. It's 5 mana and you don't run enough enchantments to make it overbearing for, say, an Elf deck to just swing through. A lot of the time this is going to be an overcost Ghostly Prison, and you probably should have just board wiped those creatures away anyway. Day of Judgment is one mana less and gets rid of the problems right then and right there.

A lot of your counters, but especially Fall of the Gavel. Swan Song hits 3 major card types for only 1 mana and 2/2 birds are worthless in a 40 life format, but even something like Arcane Denial would be a better choice. 5 life isn't worth paying that much for the spell.

There are more, but I can stop there for now, because I don't see a coherent theme or goal to the deck. You run Paradox Engine, but only 4 whole mana rocks. You're not running Sol Ring so I imagine this is for Duel Commander, but this deck is entirely too slow for Duel Commander. Paradox Engine needs creatures that tap to do something or artifacts that tap for mana to truly be abused, and as it stands this deck is not set up to really use either. Running Isochron Scepter with only 4 cards that can go on it is also problematic, and even if you ran Dramatic Reversal you might not have the ability to abuse it either since you run so few mana rocks.

Consider running 10-12 mana rocks, and lower your overall curve. Blazing Archon looks great on paper, but he is easily removed and by the time you could plainly cast him on turn 8-9, you're already going to be dead if you're playing against decks of any reasonable speed. Same goes for Avacyn and Iona. If you want to run all of these big creatures, consider adopting some kind of reanimation sub theme to bypass their egregious mana costs (Entomb, Careful Study, Frantic Search and Reanimate, Animate Dead, Dance of the Dead, etc.).

If you want to play the control deck, you'll need a win condition that comes down and is capable of killing 1-3 people (if multiplayer, but like I said I have no way of knowing which format this is for because you mana costs are way too high for Duel but you're not running Sol Ring). You can use specific creatures that can come down and kill opponents (using Master Transmuter to drop out a Blightsteel Colossus with counter spell backup can be handy), or you can use infinite combos like Sanguine Bond and Exquisite Blood or Thopter Foundry + Sword of the Meek + Ashnod's Altar. You could also run enough mana rocks that Dramatic Reversal + Scepter give you infinite mana, so you can churn out a huge Blue Sun's Zenith to kill an opponent, or something. The world is truly your oyster.

2 months ago

Cool win con.

Have you thought of other color combinations, too? Just imagining a Grixis deck with the Nalars, Thopter Foundry, Sword of the Meek, and all the U, R, and UR token producers from Kaladesh block. You could keep your U counter magic and add B & R removal and loot/tutor effects to dig for your combo.

Here I wonder if Hour of Reckoning would be good. You might also balance out your mana base to include more U and less G and W. An easy fix might be to replace all GW lands with Islands.

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